Colleges Column

New York University, which in 1890 established the nation's first
graduate school of education, plans to support its efforts to train
able teacher candidates by establishing a $100,000 scholarship
fund.

Noting the "special responsibility" of colleges and universities to
help strengthen secondary and elementary schools, John Brademas, nyu's
president, said the new fund would provide up to 50 scholarships of
$2,000 each and would be supplemented by additional financial aid based
on students' need.

Scholarships will be awarded on the basis of an applicant's minimum
combined score of 1100 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test, academic
records, and demonstrated interest in the teaching profession.

The education program is now conducted within the School of
Education, Health, Nursing, and Arts Professions, organized in 1974 to
reflect "the broadened focus of nyu's teaching programs in allied
professions," according to a spokesman.

In a study that the researchers suggest bears on the use of test cutoff
scores in admission decisions, black graduate students at the
University of Florida were found to have higher grade-point averages
than white students whose scores were the same on the Graduate Record
Examination (gre).

"At any given level of gre scores, black students outperform white
students. At a gre score of 800, the black student may have a 3.4
grade-point average; the white student with the same gre will have a
3.19 average," said Richard R. Scott, a psychologist, who conducted the
study with a colleague.

The researchers compared scores and grade-point averages for all 96
black students in the unversity's graduate school in 1980 with those of
randomly selected white students. "What it really comes down to is the
cutoff point for black students can be lower than the cutoff point for
white students and still lead to good performance," Mr. Scott said. He
said the gre "tends to devalue the skills and resources which
contribute to the eventual high performance of blacks, and exaggerates
the skills and resources of whites."

The 37-member group of college presidents that drafted the new
eligibility rules for freshman athletes approved by the National
Collegiate Athletic Association in January says it may want to modify
them.

Members of the group, which has held several meetings during the
past month, say they may propose barring all freshmen from
intercollegiate competition, at least in basketball and football.

Yale, Harvard, and Princeton Universities, and Dartmouth College are
all reporting significant drops in applications s freshman class--from
10 percent at Yale to 4 percent at Dartmouth. Officials at the schools
attribute the decline to economic conditions and population trends.

Columbia, Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania report slight
application increases, and Brown University reports an increase of 13
percent.

Although women make up only about 2.3 percent of all working
engineers nationwide--an increase from 1976 when they comprised 1.6
percent--the number of women entering one engineering field is
reportedly growing rapidly.

Chemical engineering is by far the most popular of the engineering
fields for women, according to faculty members at Louisiana State
University, where there are 106 women students in a
chemical-engineering program of 368.

Some 1,580 women graduated with degrees in chemical engineering from
accredited university engineering programs in 1981, compared to 999 in
mechanical engineering and 960 in electrical engineering, according to
the bulletin of the American Association of Engineering Societies.

The increased interest of women in chemical engineering is
apparently surging first at the high-school level, where they are
swelling enrollments in chemistry classes, according to a spokesman for
the National Society of Professional Engineers.

"Girls are astute enough to see that chemists and chemical engineers
tend to make more than teachers and nurses," says Geoffrey Pierce, a
professor of chemistry at Louisiana State.

Roughly half the nation's college graduates pursue some form of
graduate education, according to a study of recent trends in graduate
and professional education prepared for the National Commission on
Financial Assistance by scholars at Stanford University.

Though many students in recent years have been shying away from
graduate programs because of their fear of accumulating too many debts,
one of the study's findings suggests that "generally, graduate students
are frugal borrowers."

Cumulative graduate loans incurred by doctoral students averaged
$5,500 after 3.3 years of study, while those of students enrolled in
M.A. programs averaged $7,250 and those in M.S. programs $5,600.

A recent survey of graduate students at Princeton University
indicated that average total loans for those who had borrowed range
from $4,600 to $7,000.

A Stanford University survey found that half the graduate students
responding expect to carry total educational debts--graduate and
undergraduate--averaging $9,500.

Among the trends noted in the report:

The number of doctorates awarded each year peaked at about 34,000 in
1972-73, and it has declined by roughly 2,000 since then.

The number of master's degrees awarded each year peaked at about
318,000 in 1976-77 and has declined by more than 15,000 since then.

The number of first professional degrees awarded each
year--primarily degrees in medicine and law--increased throughout the
1970's and is expected to continue climbing somewhat above the number
currently graduating (about 70,000).

The proportion of women among graduate students has risen steadily
over the past decade, from 40 percent to 50 percent.--mm & sr

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